U.S.-Israel Drill to Practice Defense on Multiple Fronts

Oct. 18 (Bloomberg) -- The three-week, $30 million U.S.-
Israeli air and missile defense exercise later this month will
simulate attacks and defensive intercepts on multiple fronts
including fending off drone attacks, according to U.S. and
Israeli military officials.

About 1,000 U.S. personnel of the 3,500 participating in
the exercise -- the largest ever between the two allies -- are
starting to arrive in Israel, officials said yesterday on a
conference call with reporters. It will begin by month’s end,
they said yesterday without giving the exact start date.

The exercise follows a U.S.-led operation completed last
month that involved more than 30 nations in the largest mine-clearing demonstration held in the Persian Gulf region.

The U.S.-Israeli “Austere Challenge 2012” comes amid
threats from Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities and
Iranian vows to retaliate, and just days after Israel shot down
an unarmed reconnaissance drone controlled by Lebanon’s
Hezbollah group.

The exercise, postponed from earlier this year, is also
taking place weeks before the U.S. presidential election, as
Republican challenger Mitt Romney has attacked President Barack
Obama for throwing Israel “under the bus.”

Obama has assured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
that that the U.S. is committed to Israel’s security and the two
leaders are in “full agreement” on the goal of preventing Iran
from getting a nuclear weapon, the White House said in a Sept.
28 statement.

The exercise, two years in the planning, isn’t in response
to any current Middle East events, such as rising tensions with
Iran, officials said.

“You are looking at all the threats to Israel,” U.S.
Third Air Force Commander Lieutenant General Craig Franklin said
on the call with reporters yesterday from Ramstein Air Force
Base in Germany. “Those could be rockets, they can be mortars,
they can be short-range ballistic missiles, long-range ballistic
missiles -- so you look at the entire spectrum.”

‘Possible Salvos’

“You try to coordinate against possible salvos of those
threats,” he said.

The U.S. is deploying a Navy Aegis-class vessel and the
latest version of the Patriot missile to work in tandem with
Israel’s Arrow-2 and Iron Dome systems, said Franklin.

The exercise will also simulate drone flights over Israel
and defenses, said Israel Defense Forces Brigadier General
Nitzan Nuriel, the IDF’s lead planner for the exercise, without
providing details.

Lebanon’s Hezbollah launched a drone that was shot down
over Israeli territory this month, said Hassan Nasrallah, the
chief of the militant Shiite Muslim movement regarded as a
terrorist group by Israel and the U.S.

Nasrallah, speaking Oct. 11 on the party’s Manar television
station said the drone was Iranian-made and assembled by
Hezbollah. He said it passed over “sensitive and important”
locations, describing it as an “achievement” for the aircraft
to fly for so long before it was downed.

Multiple Fronts

“We are trying” to defend against “more than one front,
let them deal with more than one salvo a day,” Nuriel said.
“We need them to work in high tempo in order for them to be
prepared for real scenarios,” Nuriel said.

Nuriel and Franklin said there would be no live firings of
weapons in intercept drills.

“You put the hardware there and simulate its use,”
Franklin said. “You can simulate incoming salvos through
computer modeling,” Franklin said. “You stress the system, you
network it all together using the simulation and then you run
through what your responses would be. You can run pretty
stressful scenarios just by doing that,” he said.